For reasons that have deep intellectual roots (no, really) I spent some very loud times this week listening to live Japanese hip-hop. That left me in a position (once my hearing returned to ~70% of baseline) to react with honest curiosity when Cory Doctorow tweeted this vid:

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Gotta say, I find the marriage of J-pop and metal to be oddly wonderful. YMMV.

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More — the multiple layers of globalized culture visible in that vid make me want to William Gibson sitting next to me, telling me how it all came to be.*

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Enough from me. Propose your favorite culture/music/genre juxtapositions in the comments, or just treat this as another open thread.

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*If you haven’t read Gibson, or not lately, do yourself a favor. I’m rereading Zero History now, after crashing through Pattern Recognition and Spook Country over the last couple of weeks, and plan to cycle back to the Bridge trilogy pretty soon too. (Been a long time since I’ve looked at the books that put him on my map, the Sprawl trio, so I may go all the way back to Neuromancer et al. before I’m done. In any event, if you ever need Virgil to lead you through the circles of contemporary culture, Gibson is your man.

Should have added: if you are of a certain age, Neuromancer was a mind-blowing novel. I’m honestly afraid to re-read it. I fear it can’t have stood the test of time given all of the technological changes, but who knows.

I love Gibson, and make it a point to re-read the Bigend trilogy once a year. Pattern Recognition is very clearly him feeling his way into this world, especially by comparison to the other two, but Gibson feeling his way is sort of like other people’s magnum opus.

And if you can manage to leave aside the glibertarian politics, Neal Stephenson feels very similar.

I have no Japanese. What (if anything) is the song about? And do share with us your deeply intellectual reasons for considering Japanese hip-hop.

But it does make a nice segué from what I was just watching on YouTube: an open-air performance of Les Misérables from about a decade ago. Auf Deutsch, natürlich. Very nice too, except that Javert fluffs his lines in the Fantines Verhaftung number.

Japanese hip-hop
I find most of it is terrible, but occasionally there are some gems – God, Inc – El Dorado Throw Down
As for genre juxtapositions:
-Petty Booka’s good, though they’re awfully twee. Their album covering Hawaiian classics (“Let’s Talk Dirty In Hawaiian”) is great but I can’t find the songs online, settle for their cover of Material Girl.
-The Gourds got a lot of press for their cover of Gin & Juice but they had a bunch of other good stuff, especially their cover of Gangsta Lean. In a similar vein, Luther Wright & the Wrongs also do a country-western cover of the entire The Wall album that’s excellent.
-The dad of one of the guys from Daft Punk put out a “Japanese” concept album in French, Le Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki back in the day. If you like the haunting kids chorus you might also like Les Poppys, though they were 70s evangelicals it still rocks.
-If you like chiptunes at all (Nintendo bloop-bleep music) the 8-Bit Peoples compilation albums “the 8 Bits of Christmas” (xmas tunes) and Axel-F (all covers of Axel-F, ok that one gets old :) are pretty good.

I’m not even sure what hip hop is, and it’s not for lack of trying to find a serviceable definition. As soon as I’ve decided it’s all crap on the basis of the output of chart-topping hacks, I’ll hear something good that is also classified as hip hop, and I can no longer claim to dislike the genre.

I write almost no genres off and can usually find something to like. However, I have heard that there is such a thing as “country rap,” and I think I’ll make an exception for that genre, sound unheard. I have never heard it and never want to.

I have been listening recently to Neil Young’s album that he released during in the Bush years. Boy, I had managed to wipe out some of the memories of those years and they come flooding back.
A. R. Rahman can get repetitive at times but some of his stuff is really good. Dil Se is on of my favorite scores, especially this particular song

@Tom Levenson: Do not listen to Florida-Georgia Line. We have just enough rednecks and crackers around here that their horrible shit makes it to the modern rock/pop station that comes in strongest. And you can’t un-hear it. And it will insinuate itself into your brain and metastasize at inopportune moments.

Also, reading Zero History recently (and re-readingSpook Country) is a real good warm-up for tackling Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. I couldn’t help thinking, as I read Bleeding Edge, that it was Pynchon’s way of saying to Gibson: “Kid, let me show you how it’s really done.”

@Amir Khalid: I don’t know. Will it have the power to force our rural people to live in cities and ride bicycles? Apparently, even our weak UN has that power. Or it would. Were it not for valiant resistance efforts currently underway.

‘ McCain said that Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks “this is a chess match reminiscent of the Cold War and we need to realize that and act accordingly.” The senior senator from Arizona added that that didn’t mean he foresaw “a conflict with Russia, but we need to take certain measures that would convince Putin that there is a very high cost to actions that he is taking now.” ‘

@BGinCHI: that’s Gangstagrass. They’re a loose collective of sorts and I believe three albums have come out.

@Tom Levenson: There is some hick-hop that have talent, but the songs are the same ol’ “I’m a country boy, look at my jacked up truck” crap. Check out Jawga Boyz For your baseline garbage. Lacs and Moonshine Bandits have a couple decent songs.

@beltane: If he had invaded Ukraine earlier instead of being all Neville Chamberlain and not invading countries that haven’t even bothered to ask us for help, we would not be in the position we are in now.

@schrodinger’s cat: This week’s Full Show Friday is a Neil Young concert with Booker T and the MG’s as the backing band from Germany on May 18, 2002. (Though I assume you were referring to his 2006 album Living With War rather than the 2002 Are You Passionate?)

@jl: This isn’t a chess match. A chess match would be taking his case to the UN to see if he could get permission to from the Security Council to invade. That’s technically the rules. This is more like taking knight and moving it diagonally because it would be more convenient to do so.

@schrodinger’s cat: Amazingly you could also have been referring to Greendale (2003), Prairie Wind (2005) or Chrome Dreams II (2007). 30+ years into his career and he still released 5 new studio albums between Bush’s first election and Obama’s inauguration.

I am happy that it’s FINALLY raining, but the rapid humidity change brought my freakin’ migraine back again. I ran out of Excedrin, so now I’m mixing my drugs: one tablet of Tylenol, one tablet of Motrin, and a cup of coffee.

I will see your cultural mashup from Japan and raise you one from Germany / Austria.

Not sure how describe this, but apparently German tastes can be mighty strange for a mashup of young female singers wearing mod imitations of Dirndl dresses and shorts outfits, including yodeling and country and western and rock elements to a good old German background of Schlager style rhythm. I watch a lot of German music videos of all sorts on YouTube, there is an amazing variety from Gothic Celtic Punk to classic Rock to stuff that is popular today that would make Lawrence Welk swell with pride and live again.

FWIW, you can ask YouTube to find “Dirndle Rock” and you will get a bunch of videos with different performances of this, some done with live audiences sitting around your classic long tables in German beer hall style. Apparently someone thought it was a worth repeating a few times.

As long as we are on German music and rock, ask YouTube to let you see Rammstein doing “Amerika”. Fantastic hard rock and social critique.

They are saying chocolate. They’re also playing on the word “chotto,” which in Japanese means “a little.” So you get “chotto saki, chotto matte,” which mean ” a little before, wait a little (wait a sec)”. In other words, it doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot.

I’m not really into hip hop or rap, though it’s popular with my university students. My sons are into J-Pop, some Japanese rock and some US pops. I’ll have to show them this video and see if they’ve ever head of this group. New one for me and I’m impressed Tom found it.

Spook Country provided me with my sole moment of popcult fame: one of the characters re-named himself after a software package I was (and still am) the co-lead architect on (my co-lead is also a close reader of BJ). Right after the book came out, I was getting e-mails from colleagues who were also Gibson fans telling me about this.